Petticoat Government

The collective Denicolai & Provoost, Antoinette Jattiot, Nord, Speculoos selected by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and Wallonia-Brussels International represent Belgium on the occasion of the 60th edition of the 2024 Venice Biennale. Cross-mixing art, curating, architecture, typography and cartography, the collective displaces the traditional exhibition format, in a collaborative and horizontal mode, through its successive chapters and its fictional potential. The members of the collective gathered for the Biennale, with as their theme the physical and symbolic crossing of boundaries, are linked by long-term collaborations and their roles as intermediaries and critics inside and outside the field of art, from which they interrogate the way we view collective, popular, alternative organisations and their modes of sharing. For the 2024 Venice Biennale, Petticoat Government’s members are proposing a multidisciplinary scenario based on existing folkloric giants from various communities in Belgium, France, Spain. Their performative journeys in the direction of Italy, passing through the Resia Pass on 9 March 2024 and then returning to Charleroi and Dunkirk in 2025, inject a joyful disturbance into reality through the variety of plays of scale and tensions between the human and non-human, landscape and architecture, borders and their transgression. Unlike a closed work, the Belgian Pavilion is imagined as a place of passage, with a kaleidoscope perspective. By way of the place given to orality and the co-construction of stories, and the “above ground” aerial and sound staging of the gigantic figures, it is the origin of contemporary mythologies and centuries-old stories that is interrogated. Derived from a historical expression of a reversal of power relations, the title suggests a still ongoing process of disruption. PG imagines a paradigm shift by blurring the frontiers between artistic and popular disciplines and cultures. The collective and its many accomplices activate the possibility of mixing genres and attitudes as opportunities to question complexity and to make contact with the worlds with which they relate. Beyond stigmatizing individually-based practice, the project selected for the Belgian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2024 underlines the feasibility of a collective 'doing together’. Petticoat Government is a multidisciplinary collective project started by seven people: Sophie Boiron, Valentin Bollaert, Simona Denicolai, Pauline Fockedey, Pierre Huyghebaert, Antoinette Jattiot and Ivo Provoost. Working at the intersection of art, curatorial practice, architecture, graphic design, typography and cartography, the collective takes a collaborative, non-hierarchical approach to exhibition-making, shifting the focus through its chapters and fictional potential. The Biennale has brought the collective’s members together for a physical and symbolic journey. Long-term collaborations, among themselves and with others (who don’t necessarily come from the field of art), have forged this connection. As mediators and critics of the world around them, they question how we view collective and alternative organisa-tions, their mythologies and their ways of sharing. In keeping with the aesthetic and political intimacy of a so-called ‘digestive process’, and typical of Denicolai & Provoost’s collaborations across different media over the past quarter cen-tury, Petticoat Government is grounded in an empathetic view of the world. The forms they develop – based on borrowings from popular culture whose content and form they simultane-ously question – make it possible to use other languages, which they allow to be invaded by doubt, narrative and even a magical escape. In this way they open up possible paths to emancipation. The porousness of Petticoat Government’s images and fields of research is recalls those projects curated and written by Antoinette Jattiot at La Loge in Brussels. Echoing the practices of Sophie Boiron and Pierre Huyghebaert around and within their Speculoos studio, Petticoat Government’s modes of production involve a global approach that most often calls for a critique of the media and the means they have used. Connected by their teaching practice in art schools and universities, the members of Petticoat Government share a common interest in tools for sharing, the possibilities of consciously building bridges between people and disciplines and the co-creation of knowledge. The collective’s reflections centre on the production systems of exhibitions, their materials and their reuse. These are also the founding principles of Nord, the architectural practice of Paul-ine Fockedey and Valentin Bollaert, which has been active since 2015. The collective creates meaning with forms and methods that capture and transcend the issues specific to the disciplines that underpin it, demystifying their authority and complexity. Commissioner: Wallonia-Brussels Federation Curator: Sophie Boiron, Valentin Bollaert, Simona Denicolai, Pauline Fockedey, Pierre Huyghebaert, Antoinette Jattiot, Ivo Provoost

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